


Downpour

by zenstrike



Series: Defensive Adaptation [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Anxiety, Bigotry & Prejudice, Identity Issues, M/M, POV Lance (Voltron)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-10
Updated: 2018-10-10
Packaged: 2019-07-29 05:03:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16257224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zenstrike/pseuds/zenstrike
Summary: If he doesn’t feel it, what does it matter?Written for fictober day 10: “You think this troubles me?”





	Downpour

The first time Lance touches his mother and makes her shiver, he is seven. He knows immediately that something is wrong but he can’t find the words and his mother rubs his hands and marvels at how cold he is and wraps him in sweaters and blankets. Lance sweats. He tries to think of how he could tell her that he doesn’t feel the cold. Veronica takes his temperature. She frowns.

“Should we go to the hospital?” his mother asks.

Veronica tucks the blankets tighter around Lance.

His father looks down at him, considering, and it rains.

 

Lance is nine. He keeps track of his own temperature. He keeps a record in a dark blue notebook and ignores Marco when he asks what it’s for. He has to stop writing with pens because the ink freezes, sometimes. Pencils—pencils are reliable.

“And what would a doctor say?” Lance’s father says, quiet, to his mother.

“We don’t know that he’s—“

“It doesn’t matter,” his father interrupts and looks at Lance. Lance clutches his notebook behind his back. “How do you feel?”

“I feel fine,” Lance says, mouth dry. “I’m not cold.”

His mother agrees to stop trying to force him into sweaters. If he doesn’t feel it, what does it matter?

Lance promises to try and warm up, but the promise feels odd on his tongue as he says it and his thoughts spin and he chews on his bottom lip. His parents look at him with the kind of sadness he has only seen at his grandfather’s funeral. It rains.

 

Lance is ten and he waits in Rachel’s classroom while she goes over homework with her teacher. Everyone else has already left. Normally, Lance and Rachel are halfway home by now. Lance sits at one of the desks and kicks his feet and tries to imagine himself in this classroom next year, tries to imagine himself older. Rachel stands, expression blank, at her teacher’s desk and listens.

Finally, her teacher says: “Get your mom or dad to sign this and bring it back tomorrow.”

“My dad usually does it,” Lance pipes up, cheerfully, helpfully, and the teacher looks at him with her mouth in a thin line and Lance feels a chill run down his spine.

Rachel twitches.

“Our dad,” Lance corrects and this possessive feels weird on his tongue and he feels a tightness in his chest. Like he’s done something wrong. 

“That’s right,” the teacher replies, sounding relieved, and she smiles at him and Lance frowns.

He’s ten-years-old and he knows—already, he knows—there’s nothing wrong with his English and he wants to tell her that but he isn’t sure how.

Rachel snatches her homework and Lance gets to his feet and he wipes melting frost from the edge of the desk with his sleeve.

“Oh,” the teacher says. “It’s raining—“

But Lance and Rachel are already gone.

 

Lance is twelve and feeling the cold as he watches a debate on television, sandwiched between Marco and Veronica. Luis is clutching the remote. Lisa alternates between swearing under her breath, her hand on her slowly growing belly, and muttering that they should change the channel.

Nobody says the word out loud but it falls from the lips of the men on the television with alarming ease. None of his family want to put it on him. The rest of the world would, if they knew. Just one more thing to set him apart.

Rachel snatches the remote from Luis’s hand. “Jerks,” she says to the screen and changes the channel.

It rains, hard. Luis and Lisa stay for dinner and Luis tries too hard to make Lance laugh. Lance wishes they would all just say what they were thinking. He doesn’t feel fragile. He feels—strange.

 

Lance is fourteen and he gets comfortable. He holds Jenny’s hand and she smiles her big, bright smile at him and he feels a flutter in his stomach.

“You’re cold,” she laughs.

They walk to the nurse’s office together, Jenny crying at her numb hand. It’s late spring and the nurse is shocked at the frostbite on Jenny’s fingers.

The winds pick up outside. Lance runs home in the storm.

 

Lance is fourteen, still, when someone starts throwing new slurs at his face. Jenny is horrified, she says. Jenny is scared, but she doesn’t have to say that. People know, though.

Lance changes schools. His mother starts arguing with people at the front door. He hides under his blankets. He decides he won’t go near the babies.

It rains.

 

Lance is fifteen and his father, they are told, is caught up in violence at a demonstration for biological rights. Fear and chaos rule the day.

He’s there when they unplug his father and he’s there when his brothers hold his mother and he’s there when Veronica tries to pull him into a hug and then he runs. 

It storms.

 

At the funeral, Lance gives a eulogy in Spanish and half the attendees zone out before he’s halfway through and that’s fine. It isn’t for them. He holds his breath and his body temperature is almost reasonable when he shakes the hands of a dozen people he doesn’t know.

“Your hands are cold,” marvels someone his father worked with.

“Bad circulation,” Lance deadpans.

The storm hasn’t let up. Thunder cracks.

 

When Coran comes to their door, Lance is sixteen and afraid to go to school. Nothing’s happened.

Noise carries on in the form of debates, in the shape of rallies, in the voices of resistance on both sides. Like there are sides.

“Lance, yes?”

Lance is afraid to shake Coran’s hand but Coran snatches his and makes him.

“I’m not afraid of a little chill,” Coran says and Lance tries to process that. “I know someone who also has...bad circulation.”

Lance blinks. “Yeah?”

“Yes.” Coran’s moustache twitches. “She may be even colder than you.”

“Yikes.”

Coran sits at the edge of their couch and gestures for Lance to join him. His mother has, supposedly, left, but Lance knows she hovers nearby, listening and waiting.

“Let’s talk about the weather,” Coran says lightly and Lance feels the world shift underneath him.

He wants to vomit.

Coran takes his hand again and helps him through the panic and, bit by bit, Lance starts to feel a little less exposed.

 

Coran walks him through exercises. When Lance remembers, it doesn’t rain. He almost cries with the relief but he doesn’t want to soak his mother’s flowerbeds again.

He goes to the School.

 

Lance is seventeen. At the beginning of the year, there were four of them. James Griffin is gone, now, whisked away home, and it’s just Hunk and Keith and Lance in their room. 

Lance is afraid.

Fear. Like ice. Like stormy weather. Like a fog over his brain. Like half-remembered dreams where it feels like half his voice is gone. Like clearly remembered nightmares where his skin burns and prickles and exposes him for what he is to the whole world.

“Rapid mutations are rare,” Coran says to him one day, thoughtfully, as he looks over Lance’s lab results. He glances at Lance. “Are you worried?”

Lance shakes his head and smiles. Nothing troubles him. “Do what you need to do,” he says.

If he goes out at night, there’s no one to see him. No one to frighten away. Keith is fast and Pidge is intelligent and Hunk is strong and all of them can manage something—useful.

Lance—Lance can rescue a party from an ice run. Lance can ruin a football match.

He wishes he could frighten himself away.

“Hopefully it will stop here,” Allura says, smiling. She sits across from Lance and tries to teach him to concentrate, to get the ice in his veins under control.

But ice isn’t quite right. They aren’t quite the same.

 

He misses home and he clings to love when it crashes into him, so he falls into Keith and Keith—Keith stands in the rain and holds him.

Of course he pulls lightning from the sky for Keith.

Of course.

 

“Rapid mutations,” Coran says again and tugs at his moustache. He doesn’t continue.

Lance feels a storm under his skin. Behind his eyes.

“That’s the last one, right?” he asks. “I’m done now?”

 

When Lance starts getting the headaches, he is eighteen. He doesn’t tell Coran, and the lab results show nothing strange. He doesn’t tell Allura, and she doesn’t start prodding at his brain. He doesn’t tell Keith.

He lays awake at night and he thinks: what am I?

“Talk to me,” Keith says while they watch a storm beat against the earth. 

Lance shivers. “I’m cold,” he says and Keith watches him unblinkingly. “I’m just—cold.”

Keith holds his hands and tries to warm him.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading
> 
> i guess this is like a prologue for the next part in some ways?
> 
> i didn’t like how the actual line of dialogue from the prompt read when i squeezed it in so i just...got rid of it. but i think the inspiration is still pretty clear.


End file.
